Ancient Olympia March 28, 2017

A much smoother night of cruising allowed us to wake very refreshed. I can understand from the prior night's sailing how St. Paul's shipwreck could have happened. Our seas were relatively calm and still we felt the rocking of this large vessel. I find myself musing more and more on the route we are taking and the times of the first century Christians. They were up against amazing odds, operating within the hegemony of the Greco/Roman culture. We saw it on full display at the site of ancient Olympia, the site of the Olympic games in ancient times for over 1000 years.

The UNESCO site we visited on Tuesday was the excavated site of the ancient Olympic games, at the foot of the small mountain of Kronos, in the  Peloponnese peninsula, some few kilometers inland from a small port of Katakolon. After 1000 years of Olympic games--from 776 BC to the 4th century AD--the site was abandoned when the Christianized Roman empire began to forbid the practice of pagan festivals. The ancient Olympics were indeed a pagan festival, dedicated to the worship of Zeus, and including many rituals honoring the other gods of the Greek pantheon. The site was abandoned in the 4th century, then many of the buildings were destroyed by an earthquake in the 7th century, and subsequently covered with mud and silt from the two adjacent rivers. After Greece received its independence from the Ottoman Empire, many western Europeans began to express an interest in excavating ancient Greek sites, including ancient Olympia. Eventually a huge part of the site was excavated, but not much excavation is going on now. That seems a shame to me. There is obviously so much more that could be done. There is lots of visitor traffic here now. I can imagine that architectural historians are fearful that the visitor traffic could destroy as yet hidden artifacts.
The scale of the site impressed us along with the details about how the athletes, priests, sponsors, trainers and spectators gathered here every four years. It was the one pagan festival that united the Greek-speaking world and gave the Greek city-states a taste of peaceful contesting. During the months around the Olympics, there was a truce that allowed the city-states to send their best soldiers to defend the honor of their family and city, with relative assurance that other cities wouldn't attack. The honor/shame dynamic was on full display when our tour guide described the artifacts. Statues of prior year winners lined the avenues so that athletes could be inspired by the honor given to prior winners. Alternatively one could be shamed in public, too. Statues of Zeus, constructed with the fines of cheaters, were also displayed with the names and details of the crimes. Those statues lined the avenue just before the entry gate so that athletes entering the stadium would be reminded of the shameful consequences of cheating.
The whole apparatus of the ancient Olympics seems amazingly similar to the modern games. There was an Olympic committee, consisting of the priests of Zeus, who worked for four years between each Olympic event, administering the buildings and communicating with the participants. There were training regimens, housing for the athletes, accommodations for the coaches and sponsors, a system of administering the finances involved in the city-state sponsorship, rituals for recognizing the winners with olive branches, and most importantly, the cult of rituals and a system of reporters (think "TV coverage") surrounding lighting the flame, opening ceremonies, to the final recognition banquets. The modern Olympics are not far from the cultic practices of these ancient Greeks. Only our names have changed. We don't call them "religious" any more but they really serve the same function in society, cultic acts that unite peoples across many divisions, that have their own set of practices and rituals, and espouse a common "ethic:" 'Citius, Altius, Fortius' Latin for "Faster, Higher, Stronger" proposed by Pierre de Coubertin upon the creation of the modern International Olympic Committee in 1894.

We entered the stadium grounds through an archway not unlike that in many modern stadiums from where the home team takes the field. On the field were many other tourists, including many children--a group of junior high aged French school children, some high school aged kids. Their teachers encouraged them to run the length of the field, from finish line to finish line, marked in marble at each end of the field. Smart teachers! The stadium area was surrounded by sloping hills where the spectators sat. Rol and I climbed the hill to take pictures, and Rol was adopted by a friendly dog who sat down next to him to make him feel welcome.

Our luck with the weather is holding out! Spring flowers are in bloom everywhere, and the wysteria is fragrant. The purple blooming tree we call redbud is called by the Greeks the "Judas tree."